Friday, June 29, 2007

Living with war

I'm living with war in my heart every day

I was thinking about the Clash song "Something about England" as I walked to the grocery store today. The short version of the song: Mick asks about the persistent xenophobia of the English. Joe, in the persona of an old homeless man, responds by giving a history of the 20th century from the point of view of class, ending like this.

But how could we know when I was youngAll the changes that were to come?All the photos in the wallets on the battlefieldAnd now the terror of the scientific sunThere was masters an' servants an' servants an' dogsThey taught you how to touch your capBut through strikes an' famine an' war an' peaceEngland never closed this gap

The thing that strikes me the most about the song was that if you lived in England in those times, history happened to you. The US is at war, but history is not happening to a lot of us. History is not happening to me. But it is happening to a lot of other people.